…another mechanism is at work in this comparison, a mechanism that is not on the minds of the GOP’s fevered foot soldiers but is certainly on the minds of the party’s intelligentsia. The comparison has its roots in a group of German economists who, after World War II, established the European and American strains of neoliberalism.

“[For the] people who inspired the programming of neo-liberal politics in Germany [in the 1940s], the experience of Nazism was at the very heart of their reflection,” said the French philosopher Michel Foucault in a lecture he delivered on the morning of February 7, ­1979. “Nazism enabled them to define what I would call the field of adversity that they had to define and cross in order to reach their objective.” What is this all about? How does this passage relate to the teabaggers?